A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 234: Hell Unleashed - Part 1

"You said progress is a river master," Beam said. "But you also said that even though you can get a sense for its nature, you can never truly understand it. Maybe you're trying too hard to understand it. Maybe you just need to stop thinking and keep trying."

Dominus' eyes widened at the advice. To Beam, he had said one thing, but for Dominus, it had clicked, and ended up meaning something entirely different, something far more profound than what the boy had uttered.

He nodded his head slowly, and smiled. "Indeed," he said. "Indeed."

Beam slept for longer than he usually might have. From dawn until dusk – that was when his duty on the frontline of the forest defences began. But though it was dawn in title, it wasn't true dawn. It ended up being thirty minutes after first light, giving the men waking up for their dawn shift enough time to eat.

He would usually be up long before first light, but now, as he turned he rose from the floor cot of his borrowed tent, he saw that light was already creeping inside. He yawned, and grabbed his sword from the floor. He moved to step outside, before remembering his coat, and the bitter cold from the previous day.

He threw it on, despite expecting that he would overheat once the fighting began.

It was a perfect world of snow outside. He was the first one to break footprints into the patch of snow just outside his tent, and it rose up over the lip of his shallow boots, almost a hand deep. He normally would have smiled at the sight. Though bitterly cold, he liked the snow, and welcomed its coming every year.

Yet, on this day, he wasn't given time to wallow in that enjoyment. He could feel the tension in the air, and he could hear the shouts. The sky had cleared overhead, revealing blue, yet the world still seemed as full of darkness as it was the previous night.

A pair of soldiers rushed past him, spears in their hands. "Shit, shit! Get moving! It's all kicking off!" One of them was muttering to himself.

Beam recalled that Lombard had ordered that Beam's prostitutes return last night, for whatever reason. Perhaps he thought that the hostilities between the villagers and the soldiers had died down enough that such a thing was manageable. Or perhaps he simply felt it necessary to increase the soldier's morale as much as he could, by whatever means he could, before true hardship fell upon them.

Beam tapped his finger against the hilt of his sword, knowing that he should investigate the cause of the commotion, but somehow he was unwilling to get involved. He felt the dread in his chest, accompanied by a knowing – a knowing that once he stepped forward and involved himself, he wouldn't be able to rest for a long time.

He heaved another yawn that was more like a sigh this time, and set out in the direction that the soldiers had run, fearing for the worst.

The noise grew louder the nearer he got. There was a crowd of soldiers gathered a distance up ahead, seeming to be circling something. They were arguing amongst each other, and more than once those arguments broke down into shoves.

From the red droplets that decorate the snow even outside of the circle, Beam didn't have to look to guess what was inside.

He spotted Tolsey amongst the crowd, attempting to placate them.

"Vice-Captain," Beam called out. Tolsey paused his frantic order giving to look in Beam's direction. For some reason, his face fell upon seeing him, as though he was the last person in the world that Beam had wanted to lay eyes on. Beam frowned at that, growing suspicious.

"Wait, boy! Don't get involved yet – attend to your duties and defend the forest front," Tolsey ordered, but Beam was already pushing through the crowd. They were grown men, each of them bigger than he was, made heavier by the chainmail armour they wore and the heavy helmets upon their head.

Yet he moved them aside easily, even as they gave grunts of complaint, and turned around to swing at him, only to pause when they saw who it was that had been pushing them.

Beam ignored their anger, for his gaze was already fixated on the body that lay in the centre of the clearing. Blood still flowed from the gaping wound in her neck, steaming in the cold morning air as it continued to dye the snow a deep red.

Her curly blonde hair was ruined by the blood, and there was a startled look in her dead blue eyes, as she lay there in the cold, completely unmoving.

The shoulder of her dress was half uncovered, pulled down, revealing a wicked bruise that would never heal. The gash at her neck half-severed it. A cruelly large wound for such a small girl. Beam realized that he recognized her.

It was that girl Charlotte, who Beam recalled being struck a short while ago, as she worked the nights in the soldiers' camp. He recalled that fearful expression on her face. She hadn't wanted to keep working for the soldiers. Likely, none of the girls had. And yet here she was, dead.

Dead, and likely not more than twenty minutes ago. From the size of the wound, Beam knew it to have been done by a sword. The men around him took a few steps back. He said nothing, yet there was a weight to his aura now that intensified, a vicious darkness. Beam's hand was on the hilt of his weapon, yet he had not drawn it yet. He could not tear his eyes away from the corpse.

Even Tolsey found himself cowering in the face of Beam's oppressive aura. His voice caught in his throat the moment he attempted to call out to him – he had to fight just to be heard.

"Beam," he said, his voice coming out more as a desperate plea. "Don't do anything, not until the Captain comes."